If you thought July was so hot that the trees were heard whistling for dogs, that you had to turn on your furnace to cool off and that logs rolled into the shade by themselves, you wouldn't seem too far from the truth.

The Boston office of the National Weather Service confirmed Thursday that July 2013 was the hottest month ever recorded in Connecticut. The calculation was based on records in Hartford dating back to 1905.

"Hartford had its hottest month on record," said Rebecca Gould, meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Boston office. "The average temperature was 77.9, and the next-hottest July was 77.1 degrees set in 2010."

Other recording stations in Connecticut also recorded their hottest July, including in Stamford, Middletown and Storrs, which has been keeping weather records since 1888.

It was the hottest month ever in Bridgeport, too. However those records are not seen as significant, because the Bridgeport records only date back to 1948. According to the NWS, the average high temperature in Bridgeport for July 2013 was 78.8 degrees, topping the 78.4-degree record set in 1994.

Gould said that July is usually the hottest month of the year; an exception was 1973, when August took the annual hottest-month prize in the state.

However, the temperature never hit the triple digits in Connecticut last month, except unofficially in one or two inner-city neighborhoods. But experts said there were too many nights in which the heat never dissipated. This made it not only difficult to sleep, but pushed up the averages.

"The nighttime temperatures -- that's why the record was broken," said Chris Burt, a weather historian with Weather Underground. "We also had records broken in Providence (R.I.) and Bridgeport. Very impressive. Those hot nights is what did it -- consistently in the 90s during the day and the 70s at night."

"It was consistently warm -- warm at night. We had three record maximum minimum temperatures. So we didn't need any triple digits to break the record."

Indeed, the string of hot nights were seen as unusual by the experts.

"At Bradley, we had 17 out of the 31 days where the temperature never dropped below 70," said Quincy Vagell, a meteorologist with WTNH Channel 8 in New Haven. "That's unprecedented."

"We're definitely warming, and the past several years have been the hottest," said Samantha Borisoff, a climatologist with the Northeast Regional Climate Center in Ithaca, N.Y. "Now, a record in one month isn't significant, but if you look at the overall trend, yes, we're breaking records left and right."